Two estates shaped the village that visitors know today. In the 1880s the banker and railroad financier J. Kennedy Tod built his “Innis Arden” estate out on Elizabeth's Neck, with a stone mansion, a boathouse, and gardens along the peninsula; in 1945 the town acquired the property, and Tod's Point became Greenwich Point Park — the beloved town beach, with its tidal ponds, walled garden, and holly grove, that locals still simply call “the Point.” Inland, the pond and lawns of Binney Park were given to the village in 1928 by Edwin Binney, the co-inventor of the Crayola crayon, who summered nearby.
Old Greenwich is the original Greenwich. In 1640 Robert Feake, Captain Daniel Patrick, and their companions bought the land along this stretch of Long Island Sound from the Siwanoy people — a transaction recorded, in the language of the day, as a sale for twenty-five coats, and one that, like so many of its kind, began the long dispossession of the people who had lived here first. The settlers laid out farms and a landing on the sheltered coves, and the Feake-Ferris House, built around 1645 and still standing, survives as one of the oldest houses in Connecticut. For generations this was simply the “Old Town,” the founding ground from which the rest of Greenwich would grow.
Why People Visit Old Greenwich
Old Greenwich offers the Connecticut Gold Coast at its most low-key — a real shore village with a beach peninsula, a pond park, and a handful of streets of shops, plus the quiet distinction of being where Greenwich began. Visitors come for Tod's Point and the Sound, the founding history, and the unhurried village pace, and stay for the beaches, the coves, and the deep-rooted New England feel. It is refined, historic, and genuinely Connecticut.
